Spanish disquisition: or, how a bookish Gringa learned to stop worrying and love el idioma

Washington Monthly, Oct, 2002 by Liesl Schillinger

IN THE FIRST VOLUME OF THE CHILDREN'S series The Chronicles of Narnia, two brothers and two sisters travel through a wardrobe into a magic land where they are entertained by beavers. In the presence of these beavers (who can talk), the children hear the name of "Aslan"--the powerful golden lion who (they are told) benignly watches over all the creatures of the realm. A warm, joyous feeling steals over the three good children, Lucy, Peter, and Susan, when they hear the name "Aslan." But the bad child (for alas, there is a bad child), Edmund, shudders with loathing when he hears the name. The syllables that delight his siblings make his flesh creep; what they interpret as good, he interprets as threatening and sinister. Eventually, to the great relief of the beavers and everyone else, Edmund comes around.

The reason I bother to pass on this morsel of juvenilia is that, as a child growing up in university towns in the Midwest and Southwest, I studied French and German and Latin with fervid devotion, but reacted to the sound of Spanish pretty much the same way Edmund reacted to the sound of Aslan. Even then, 20 years ago--before J. Lo and Shakira, John Leguizamo, Vicente Fox, Nuevo Latino cuisine, Y Tu Mama Tambien, and Penelope Cruz--even then, nobody would have refuted the fact that Spanish was a useful language for a North American to learn; and I certainly accepted its popularity and practicality. Nonetheless, for me, Spanish lacked some indefinable prestige that I associated with other foreign languages. I had an illogical distaste for Spanish, and the Edmund/Aslan parable is the best way to explain it.

I often have encountered other linguists, non-linguists, professors, and people in other professions who confess that they, too, dislike the sound of Spanish. "It's ugly," a typical Spanish-averse friend--an elegant woman with an advanced degree and knowledge of two other foreign languages--once declared to me without embarrassment. She passed on a bit of gossip she had heard and found amusing. Apparently, Ivana Trump's son, Donald Jr., once told his mother he wanted to learn Spanish. "Why?" she had retorted. "So you can speak with the servants?"

Like her, anti-Espanol Americans don't see the point of learning Spanish (or, more tactfully, say they just don't care for it). Well-meaning detractors say their objections are aesthetic; although French is plenty nasal, it is Spanish that strikes them as nasal in an unpleasant way. Although German is guttural, it is Spanish that they find unpleasantly guttural. Russian sounds slurred, but it is Spanish whose slurredness bothers them. It is an irrational mindset. It's worth "sharing" this with you, as Dame Edna might sa3 only because a sizable minority of Americans still have the Edmund/Asian hangup about Spanish.

The Spanish language suffers from an unaddressed image problem in this country, connected to Southwestern and urban impressions of Hispanicity that sink the language and culture in the grim border zones of Texas and California and in the ghettoes and elevators of metropolises. A study on a touchy subject like this probably never has been conducted, but the Spanish-language-shunners of my acquaintance (including my Hispanic friends who intentionally choose not to understand Spanish even though it was their parents' first language) associate the sounds of Spanish with negative qualities--not evil ones, like violence, anger or malice--but weaknesses, like laziness, passivity, poor education, anti-intellectualism, and a perverse refusal to enunciate.

It may seem counterintuitive to assert that the Spanish language has a bad reputation in this country, when you consider that, as of the last census, there were some 35 million self-described Hispanic-Americans residing here, and that projections show these numbers will only increase. The papers report that forward-looking Bobos, eying long-term demographic and employment trends, are now jousting to get their kids into Spanish-concentration magnet schools. The president sprinkles Spanish (clumsily pronounced, but he's trying) into his speeches; politicians in southern states like Texas carry on entire debates in Spanish. Of the 1.2 million American college students who studied a foreign language in 1998, more than 650,000 of them--more than half--took Spanish.

Nonetheless, several authorities on American cultural trends agree that ingrained animosity towards Spanish persists in pockets throughout this society: from the Europhiles in the upper echelons who find the language declasse to the middle-classic Hispanic-Americans who want to shed their hyphenated backgrounds (or want their children to), to the struggling laborers in the lower strata who resent the growing Hispanic presence in the American workforce and see the Spanish language as the embodiment of their competition.

"This goes back to high school in the 1950s," says Joseph Epstein, lecturer in English and writing at Northwestern University and author of the new book Snobbery: The American Version. "In the old days, the brightest kids took Latin, the dullest kids took Spanish and women took French. If you wanted to do science or medicine, it was thought best to study German. For the rest, there was Spanish." The old, informal language channeling system has eroded, and Spanish is now popular among both male and female students. Four years ago, nearly six million of America's 13.5 million public high school students were studying Spanish. And yet, Ilan Stavans, the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College and author of The Hispanic Condition, firmly believes that the old prejudice lives on. "The perception of Spanish as a language of barbarians, of not fully civilized citizens, has remained with us, even though Spanish is in any college the most popular language. We still retain the impression that if you learn French or German, you're going to be closer to the heart of things Western."